Anyone notice how the second term is often used for the first? I think I’ve done it myself on occasion. OED has an earliest cite of 1976 for scupper in the sense of to sink a ship. It makes sense actually. Scupper, n., meaning a hole in a ship’s side, dates back to the 15th century but oddly enough when it was used as a verb (not until the 19th century it would seem) it was first as a slang military term for ‘to surprise and massacre’ and later more generally for ‘to defeat, destroy’, etc.

The noun scuttle too dates back to to the 15th century and means a slightly different kind of a hole in the ship’s deck or the side; the verb for cutting a hole in the side of a ship to sink her has 17th century cites. Other scuttles both nouns and verb - to run, a dish or platter (hence much later the coal scuttle), etc - are unconnected.

So the upshot seems to be if you want to use scupper for scuttle go right ahead, you have history and the OED on your side!

Unfortunately though it used to be my job in a morning when I was a kid in the 1960’s, before I went to school, I had to rake the cinders out then put newspaper in the grate then the firewood and then I had to go outside to the coal shed to fill the coal shuttle with coal and in the winter it was it was absolutely blimming freezing, and once the fire was lit I had to hold a piece of newspaper…

Placing ash and cinders in the coal shuttle I would take it down the back stairs and out to a cinder patch in a safe corner of the garden.

I would then fill the coal shuttle with coal and coke (similar to coal) from the cellar, gather chipped wood and rolled newspapers and carry this up the back stairs to my ‘tweenies’ nursery and leave ready by the fireplace for the start of a brand new day.

Oddly that first site I linked to used “Shuttle” in its title, which I missed, so two different words and two different spellings of one of them are present in that ad.

When I was young, my job every winter night was to scoop coal into a bin that augered it into the furnace. I would us a bushel basket to carry the cinders and put them onto our alley behind the house to allow the garbage truck and cars to get through when it rained or snowed. Coal was kept in our basement and was put there using a chute through a small window (info for the young).

My parents got their aga for £100 20 years ago. someone they knew was throwing it out. It is about 40 maybe more years old. Cream solid fuel. Well was solid fuel been converted to gas, as when my dad had his tripple heart by pass he was no longer able to lift the coal shuttle thingy.

Mum and dads heats the water and the house due to it being so warm. They are havign centrel heating fitted this week and was told they could connect it all together, somehow. but have chosen not too( i don’t understand it)

Shuttle for scuttle is in DARE, but it doesn’t seem to have a regional locus. It’s a folk etymology that likely arose in a number of different places at different times. The standard form is scuttle. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has twelve hits for coal scuttle, but only two for coal shuttle.